Image: Donna Carroll by Michel Saive for Maastricht University – CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Meet Donna Carroll, the Senior Coordinator of Professional Development for Teaching & Learning at EDLAB. Before stepping into her current role, Donna worked as a physics lecturer in both the Netherlands and the UK, where she often incorporated gaming elements into her teaching. Now, she designs innovative training activities for UM-teaching staff.

At the most recent UM Education Days, Donna introduced an interactive card game she developed, called Cards Against Pedagogy, aimed at helping participants connect and reflect on their teaching practices.

Instructors naturally hope their students enjoy their courses, but enjoyment isn’t usually the primary focus when designing education. The same applies to professional development activities. However, fun is crucial—it fosters a positive atmosphere that enhances engagement, creativity, collaboration, and learning. So, when my colleague, Niklas Wenzel, and I were invited to kick-off Education Days 2024, I was keen to try something new. Instead of the usual presentation, we jumped straight in with a game I created, inspired by the popular Cards Against Humanity. Thanks to its open license (Creative Commons CC-BY), I was able to adapt and build upon the original design. In my version, Cards Against Pedagogy, I added a reflection round where participants share insights about effective teaching and learn from one another, making the game not only fun but also a powerful professional development tool.

 

After its success at the Education Days, the game gained further interest from colleagues at other universities when we demonstrated it at the National Conference for EHON (Het Expertisenetwerk Hoger Onderwijs). For that reason, I was keen to share the full version of the game as an open educational resource via edusources. It is now free to download and adapt – it even has blanks at the end that you can print off and fill in with your own statements. The game received nearly 200 views in its first week!

You can download the digital version of Cards Against Pedagogy here: Cards Against Pedagogy
If creating your own version, you need the attribution: Cards Against Pedagogy, created by Donna Carroll with graphic design by Damian Chmielewski, Maastricht University, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Interested in reusing or sharing?

The Maastricht University Library is here to support lecturers and researchers like Donna. As part of our commitment to open education, we hold a license for edusources, a national platform for Open Educational Resources (OER) developed by SURF. This platform provides an excellent opportunity to share your teaching materials openly and collaboratively.

Edusources is dedicated to digital Open Educational Resources, offering a space to both share and discover valuable teaching materials. Sharing your resources not only broadens access to your work but also facilitates cross-institutional collaboration, creating a rich repository of learning tools.

You can choose to share your resources either publicly or restrict access to your institution or professional community. Ready to contribute? You can upload materials directly to edusources after logging in through SURF Conext, though final publication is handled by the library. For more information or assistance, use the Ask Your Librarian web form to contact a library specialist.